Fear is such a powerful emotion for humans that when we allow it to take us over, it drives compassion right out of our hearts.
—Thomas Aquinas
Lust is the source of all our actions, and humanity.
—Blaise Pascal
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
—Aldous Huxley
To sin is a human affair, but to justify sins is a demonic affair.
—Leo Tolstoy
I prefer the company of animals more than the company of humans.
Certainly, a wild animal is cruel.
But to be merciless is the privilege of civilized humans.
—Sigmund Freud
Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea.
And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other “higher” ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky
As countless as grains of sand by the sea are human passions, and they all differ; all of them, vile or lofty, begin by being under a man’s control and then become his terrible masters. Blessed is he who has chosen the most lofty of passions: his immeasurable bliss grows and multiplies tenfold with every hour and minute, and he penetrates deeper and deeper into the infinite paradise of his soul.
—Nikolai Gogol
“How gloriously has Christ rolled away the great load of human sin, adequately recompensed the claims of divine justice, and magnified the law, and made it honourable!”
– Charles Spurgeon
Human history is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy. – C.S. Lewis
The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity.
—Voltaire
Let us not forget that the reasons for human actions are usually incalculably more complex and diverse than we tend to explain them later and are seldom clearly manifest.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky
The human brain is a complex organ with the wonderful power of enabling man to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is that he wants to believe.
—Voltaire
Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt
True human strength doesn’t lie in bursts of energy but in indestructible calm.
—Leo Tolstoy
If humanity was able to learn by direct observation of children, I could have spared myself the trouble to write this book.
—Sigmund Freud
By fixing its followers a strong psychic infantilism and making them share a collective delusion, religion succeeds in sparing quantity of human beings an individual neurosis.
—Sigmund Freud
Amazing, that ever sinners should sit with their Saviour! To what dignity has CHRIST exalted human nature. And how did he do it? Why, by humbling himself. Let us go and do likewise.
—George Whitefield
God hath woven into the principles of human nature such a tenderness for their off-spring, that there is little fear that parents should use their power with too much rigour.
—John Locke
To love truth for truth’s sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.
—John Locke
So that God, by commanding to subdue, gave authority so far to appropriate: and the condition of human life, which requires labour and materials to work on, necessarily introduces private possessions.
—John Locke
So that God, by commanding to subdue, gave authority so far to appropriate: and the condition of human life, which requires labour and materials to work on, necessarily introduces private possessions.
—John Locke